Christian Influence: The Subcultural Narratives of Evangelical Celebrities on Instagram

Christian Influence examines how understudied evangelical media celebrities use Instagram to cultivate religious authority and to convey distinctive subcultural narratives about evangelical values and culture today.

The book explores the way that discrete kinds of evangelical celebrities--Celebrity Pastors, Women’s Ministry Leaders, Christian-Media Celebrities, and Secular-Media Celebrity Christians--all used Instagram across 2020-2021 to perform specific subcultural narratives to their followers. Detailing these narratives gives unique insights into how the authority of celebrities and the affordances of social media are combining to challenge the strictures of authority within evangelicalism and raises questions about celebrity power in the contemporary shaping and reshaping of evangelical culture.

Christian Influence is a useful and timely read for scholars with an interest in evangelicalism specifically, or religion and religious studies, media and cultural studies, sociology of religion, and communication more broadly.

Zachary Sheldon is a Lecturer in the Department of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University, USA. His research on religion and religious media has appeared in venues such as Communication Studies, Journal of Media and Religion, and the Journal of Communication & Religion.